The Open Web is Under Attack

Yesterday, Tim O'Reilly published a provocatively titled post: “The War for the Web."  In it he discusses the dangers to the web as an open platform from the attempts by the biggest players to own more and more of the user experience:

We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

I share Tim’s concerns.  If you have not read Tim’s post, go read it now!  If you come back, here is some more food for thought.

Carriers are spending tons on lobbying against the FCC’s push for net neutrality.  The irony here is that first the Internet and later the Web were conceived as entirely neutral by design.  There was a clear separation between layers of the stack (web applications on top of Http on top of TCP/IP on top of whatever physical transport).  This separation has been essential for allowing rapid innovation at all layers of the stack.  Transport speeds have gone up hugely even at the local loop (FIOS anyone?) at the same time that we have gone from Geocities to Google Apps.  Despite this tremendous success, carriers and now also some content companies are fighting the design because the open design is so powerful that it is destroying their existing business models.

Google is building its entire web stack by themselves.  From custom hardware in their data centers all the way up to their own browser and most recently a proposal for a protocol to extend http (spdy).  A lot of people inside of google have the best of intentions, but as we all know those pave the way to hell.  It is a very small step from where google is today to a google that pushes everyone to use Chrome with spdy against google servers.  If will of course all be in the name of "the best experience” for endusers.  I wonder where I have heard that before.

For more examples of how small steps that all seem innocuous by themselves can lead us down the path towards a less open web, I suggest heading over to Chris Messina’s blog and reading “The death of the URL” (skip the obligatory Matrix reference at the top).

In a follow-up post I will share some thoughts on what to do about it.